Way down in Texas in the early 1900s, a weird little chalk drawing started showing up on railroad boxcars: a minimalist sketch of a lonesome character with a ten-gallon hat, smoking a pipe, signed “Bozo Texino.”
About 80 years later, a wanderlusting Texas punk kid with a super 8 camera was lurking around the Santa Fe yards, filming the boxcars going by, and in the viewfinder of the camera a strange drawing appeared—Bozo Texino. Bill Daniel spent the next 20 years researching, filming, riding freights— hoping to uncover the story behind this haunting box car scribble.
Finally in 2005, the film, Who is Bozo Texino?, was finished and went on tour across the country, DIY punk tour style. The film also screened in festivals all over the world, and in art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.
The logical next project would be a book based on this history, and the continuation of moniker culture. In 2008, the first edition of Mostly True was compiled and published. The railroad moniker story kept growing, with an exploding new culture of boxcar graffiti artists creating a vibrant, coast to coast community of freight riders and boxcar artists. Twelve years later, Mostly True is going into its third edition, with a bunch of new content and new contributing artists, writers, and photographers. That’s what we’re funding here: the creation of this crazy new edition of “The West’s Most Popular Hobo Graffiti Magazine.”
Mostly True (third edition) is the print culmination of, by now, 36 years of obsessive rail culture documentation, collection, and culture jamming by filmmaker and artist Bill Daniel. The book is an ongoing “archive practice” that has followed the completion of his influential 2005 experimental/documentary film on hobo lore and moniker graffiti, Who is Bozo Texino?
Using the template of a vintage rail magazine, this “operative metaphor,” as Daniel calls the method of Mostly True, allows the book to seamlessly combine historical and contemporary material. The result demonstrates the real cultural continuum of the folkloric, labor, and art traditions of 100 years ago through the contemporary communities of graffiti, punk, and art.
Creator and editor Bill Daniel has pulled new material from his milkcrate archives in his studio down in the Texas oil patch, and has solicited new photographs, drawings, and stories from his train-obsessed artist friends. The new edition will be comprised of about 70% new material, with some of the most essential elements of the original book included again.
The new edition will keep the same vintage style and periodical format to present a ton of new material (check out the project video too see some of it in action):
Bill Daniel has spent four decades in art-making and countercultural participation— spanning documentary, folklore, amateur archive, and DIY cultural practices. Proclaiming a “folk poetics of survivalism,” Daniel aspires to fuse punk values with a quest for hybrid forms of cultural expression and deployment in his films, photography, and itinerant exhibitions.
Microcosm Publishing & Distribution is a small-and-mighty force out of Portland, Oregon. We’ve been publishing and distributing books and zines for 24 years, including the first two editions of Mostly True in 2008 and 2012 respectively. Our mission is to put your power in your hands, and our vision is to change the face of publishing to reflect the lives of readers.
You need this book; we need to sell as many copies up front as we can in order to pay the printer; Bill needs to buy time to sort through his deluge of paper and finish putting this thing together.
This Kickstarter project is making that all possible, by letting you pre-order the book and some of Bill’s unique art and artifacts, and artworks by his brilliant friends.
Kickstarter funding is all-or-nothing: That means that if we don’t make our goal by the end of the project, we get zip, zero, nada. It also means that we can exceed our goal and reach even more corners of the universe with the original railroad moniker book.
This book is full of fascinating history and cultural lore. We cannot, however, recommend that you kids jump on trains and write your names on stuff.